When I was eleven years old I cried a lot. It wasn't the loud, dramatic crying you did in front of people to make them feel bad, it was the shaky breathed, watery, trembling crying you did curled up alone and away from the world. I didn't like Hogwarts. I hated it. A Slytherin? I couldn't be a Slytherin. I didn't want to be a part of the evil house. All those years running around with Joel and Ellie, making fun of their brother Lysander for being Slytherin, and it turned out I was one as well? I was as bad as him? What did I do? Where did I go wrong?

I was used to feeling reasonably content. I was used to being assured of my worth, assured of my place in the grayish hills and browning grass that stretched out behind my house. And then I was in a weird place with weird people with pictures that talked and stairs that moved and I was one of the evil ones that no one wanted to talk to. When the Sorting Hat called out my house, Joel's face was crestfallen, but Ellie looked impassive. Maybe she wasn't paying attention at all. She spaces out a lot. But when it was her turn, she looked slightly disappointed to have to walk towards the Ravenclaw table and not the Slytherin one. Joel looks even more torn when they call Hufflepuff for him, and so the three of us were unhappy and miserable for the first weeks of school.

For one, Joel is the last person I would have ever put in Hufflepuff. I had always thought- but never said aloud- that he'd fit with his brother in Slytherin. And Ellie hates reading. I don't know if she can read. We don't belong in the houses we'd been placed in. Maybe the Sorting Hat is broken. Well. They got over it. I just don't get over things that well. I'm a baby. Things bother me for a long time after they happen.

Lysander Hart decided to make it his mission to make me upset everyone he saw me. He succeeded because despite the fact that I'd spent my entire life making fun of him, I still liked him. He was cool and self possessed and quietly attractive in a way I didn't understand and was not entirely comfortable with. It was like he always changed, his face shifting and his posture twisting depending on who he talked to. I wanted to know what he was but I couldn't because he wouldn't do anything other than piss me off.

As twelve year olds Joel and Ellie and I would meet whenever we could, kids sneaking out in the dark, going outside to the quidditch pitch when it was warm enough, huddling together in the library, reverent whispers and giggles filling the still cool, dry air. When we were too tired we would stumble, in a sort of drunken exhaustion, back to our dormitories, but sometimes we were too tired and crash in someone else's common room. I found myself in the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw common rooms more than the Slytherin one.

As thirteen year olds Ellie was angry and distant and would vanish into the Ravenclaw dormitories before we could talk to her.

"She can't read," Joel tells me. "That's why."

But I liked Ellie and I wanted her back in the small, shadowed spaces we claimed as ours. Joel and I sat in those places, curled into each other out of fear of the yawning, cavernous space that used to hold Ellie. I guess that eventually Joel and I just started to find different places, places for two and not three.

As fourteen year olds Joel was surly and offensive and would be as gentle as he was rough. But all the same, he would keep meeting up with me. He was forward and didn't have any qualms about telling me things outright, and at first I appreciated it, then I wished he would stop.

"I love you," he'd say sometimes, and then in the same breath he'd snap at me to shut up and say that he didn't know why he put up with me at all.

As fifteen year olds I dreaded the meetings more than school itself, and I was alone because I hated what the three of us had become. Nothing special. That was all we were. Boring, angry at ourselves and sad that we were angry. I stopped going, and I don't know if Joel did as well. Maybe he sat out there, by himself, in spaces meant to fit one. I found my own space, and it was up in the astronomy tower. I liked stars. I hated how dark and closed in the slytherin common room was, and plus the astronomy tower is the farthest you can get from the dungeons.

And well... wands. I hated wands. I couldn't use one. It wouldn't work. I could feel that it was going to, but then it never would. Always disappointed. I slouched in the back of my classes and hid the best I could.

Lysander called me a squib, and I told him to fuck off and snuck up to the astronomy tower, upset- but too proud to admit it.

Everything was wrong. There was no more life where I didn't have to worry about things, there was only me second guessing everything I did. There weren't anymore friends, there was only sickening swings between too-loud laughter and angry screaming. There weren't carefully planted rows of lavender behind the Hart's house, but there were rows on my skin, there weren't secret meetings at night, but there were three kids staying up wondering what the fuck happened to them. There were three kids who were out of place, three kids who were angry and confused and quickly losing their faith in the magic of Hogwarts.

I snuck up to the astronomy tower, still upset, but now free of an audience to see, and I stand as high up as i can get- on the concrete ledge that edges the floor- staring up at the darkening sky and wishing that I hadn't come to Hogwarts at all. Wishing that I was a muggle, maybe. Maybe it would've been better if I didn't exist to fuck things up in the first place. I mean, just look at me.

"Really?" a familiar voice asks, from behind me.

"Fuck off."

"I thought you were above this sort of thing."

"No."

"Get down. I didn't mean it. You're not a squib."

"I told you to fuck off."

"Still upset? How long have you been standing here? Listen. Come here."

I don't answer him, and line my toes up to the edge, hands shoved in my pockets.

"I said, come here."

I look down.

"Hey!"

"Give me a break, Hart. I'm fucking tired of you. All of you. You and Joel and Ellie."

But I'm dragged back and away, and I sag into the ground.

"You're insane."

"So you've told me," I say wryly, looking up at him.

Lysander hart stares down at me, at a loss for words. I can see the words in his eyes, I can see him clicking through options, calculating, finding the routes with the most guaranteed chances of success. But he never says anything. I pick myself off the ground and march away from the indignity of being caught.

...

Ellie sits at the Ravenclaw table at breakfast with a piece of paper and a glare. I watch her with my chin in my hands, as her eyes skip and circle back over words, and as frustration materialises on her face the longer she stares. I want to talk to her, but the longer I look at her the more I realise that I barely know her at all anymore.

She's got friends that like sports and knowing everything, and they wear clear lip gloss and draw maps and have ink stains on their hands. They sweep around like storms, skipping classes and reading, all the time reading, words spilling from their mouths, haughty-eyed book-drunk girls that engulfed and surrounded Ellie until I couldn't see her anymore, the only different one, the one that hated words- that one dark, angry one who's mouth was gagged and who's eyes were desperately scanning the page.

Joel sits at the Hufflepuff table at breakfast with his hair a tussle, his knuckles flushed, and his messy mouth rubbed raw from his own teeth. He bites and scratches himself, and would tear himself apart if he could. They had stuffed him into a box, putting him in Hufflepuff. They'd twisted his limbs and sat on the lid and suffocated him with their niceness, and he hated it. I watch with hunched shoulders as his eyes roam angrily around the room, and I look away and shrink back when his eyes find me. I want to hide from him, but the longer he looks at me, the more I realise that I loved him once.

He's got friends that like soft things and warmth, and they wear comfy sweaters and drink hot chocolate and trail their fingers over the worn wood tables absently. They make quiet jokes and soft talk, they had the truest, clearest hearts beating in their chests, always loyal, always insufferably loyal, always kind and sensible. They gently plied at Joel, smiling, trusting, believing the smile on his face as the rage built up behind his eyes. He's mastered the casual slouch, the gentle movements, but he is anything but gentle, he is anything but kind.

Lysander sits at nearly the opposite end of the Slytherin table with his ever shifting face and lies making themselves up in his mind as he eats. I watch him out of the corners of my eyes- you can't trust Lysander; you can't trust a liar. He shifts and clicks and becomes a different shape with every word that comes out of his mouth, measuring things up for size before trying them out. He looks like a robot with the face of a teenager, something difficult to understand but easy to believe. They'd been right, to put him here, where cunning and ambition ran rampant among us, where it wasn't a question of whether or not to hurt, but rather how to hurt.

He's got friends that like to play the same game as he does, and their lies mix with his until you're left with your head spinning, looking back and forth between them in despair until you give up on listening at all. They ran you in circles, they whispered things that didn't mean anything but changed you anyways. They weren't the loud ones of our house, they were the quiet ones, the ones that ruled form the background, the ones that called you darling and smiled if you flushed in embarrassment. They lie back and forth, clicking and shifting against each other, a never ending game of mousetrap, a whole group of people trying to corner each other, a confusing mess of alliances and friendships and respect and enmity that was cold and intricate and held Lysander in its web in such a way that you wondered if it was the web trapping him, or if he was the spider.

I sit by myself because I am too wary of these things called 'friends' and would rather be alone than be hurt, because for me it is, indeed, not a question of whether or not to hurt, but how to hurt. I am not interesting. I am only trapped, mostly troubled- mostly an onlooker, and happy to stay that way. I was the one who wrote the stories and they were the ones who lived through them. When this was all over, I'd be left alone with dead characters around me, clutching my handwritten story, The Adventures of the Individualists, to my chest and wishing that I had been a part of it instead.